Lewandowski and the others continued walking through the cave. As the altitude increased, the Red Sea beneath their feet seemed to grow more and more distant.

After walking for a while, the passage ahead suddenly turned pitch black.

Lewandowski preemptively relit the torch.

The moment they stepped into the darkness, the Red Sea and everything around it vanished. Darkness instantly enveloped the four.

"What's going on?" Dodge, who had been silent, suddenly asked, alarmed.

"Don't panic yet... let's take a few steps back and see..." Lewandowski suggested.

But they retreated dozens of steps, and the dark environment remained unchanged.

"Ten more steps," Lewandowski said, his forehead now covered in sweat.

They retreated another dozen steps.

They should have long since returned to the position where they last saw the Red Sea, but no matter how far they retreated, they couldn't return to the bright environment.

"Did we enter some kind of imaginary space?" Zoey asked, her voice trembling with lingering fear.

No one dared to answer her question. No one knew what caused the darkness.

They only knew that they could only continue forward; they couldn't retreat.

Lewandowski had no choice but to brace himself, holding the torch and leading everyone forward.

Everyone's hearts were in their throats, afraid of encountering danger.

"Move quickly, we can't delay," Lewandowski urged.

So, they quickened their pace and hurried along.

The fat man hadn't fully recovered yet, and he wasn't used to the accelerated pace. He coughed at the back of the line, his voice echoing in the cave, sounding eerie.

They walked silently for five or six minutes before finally seeing a glimmer of light ahead. Light meant relative safety, and Lewandowski unconsciously quickened his pace.

The moment they entered the light, the darkness suddenly disappeared.

Everyone wondered why the situation here was so strange. Even the transition between day and night had a gradual change, but here it was direct: white one moment, black the next.

The rock of the cave remained unchanged, still transparent crystal lattices.

Lewandowski was curious and wanted to understand the pattern of this black and white alternation. So, he had everyone stand in place while he ran to the back of the line and walked a dozen steps in the direction they had come from.

It was as bright as ever.

"This is a one-way road. Take one step forward, and no matter how many steps you take back, you'll only be at the distance of that one step forward."

Lewandowski's summary sounded extremely abstract and awkward. However, everyone understood the magic of this cave passage. They

— could only move forward, only move forward, only move forward.

"Hey!"

Zoey diverted everyone's attention from Lewandowski's conclusion. She pointed to the environment outside the crystal lattice: "Look, the Red Sea is gone!"

At Zoey's prompting, everyone looked out through the crystal lattice and discovered that the endless Red Sea beneath their feet had been replaced by a blue-black ocean. However, the scale of the ocean in front of them was a bit smaller.

The sea surface was silent, and there were no obvious problems from a macroscopic perspective.

Fortunately, everyone had no scientific curiosity about this ocean at the moment, so they continued to forge ahead without delving into it too deeply.

As they moved forward, the phenomenon of alternating light and dark continued to occur.

But each time they experienced a change between light and dark, the world outside the crystal lattice would change with it.

After the third light-dark alternation, the ocean seemed to be the same ocean, but some algae plants with colors clearly different from the seawater appeared on the ocean. The algae were connected in patches, occupying half of the ocean.

After the fourth light-dark alternation, creatures that ate algae appeared in the ocean. These creatures were somewhat similar to ancient marine organisms on Earth.

From the fifth light-dark alternation onwards, the crystal lattices on both sides began to show different pictures. On one side of the crystal lattice, the algae-eating creatures multiplied rapidly and showed new evolutionary trends, and the amount of algae on the sea surface decreased accordingly; on the other side of the crystal lattice, the algae proliferated rapidly and began to show new evolutionary trends, while squeezing the living space of the algae-eating creatures. At this time, the sea surface was almost entirely covered with different colors of algae.

The further they went, and the more light-dark alternations they experienced, the more diverse the situations in the external space shown by the crystal lattice became. The crystal lattice rock, which originally could only show one situation, could now reflect five or six situations simultaneously.

And after another light-dark alternation, these five or six situations increased exponentially, becoming more than thirty.

What impressed Zoey the most was the evolutionary direction in which marine algae took the absolute initiative. The plants in the ocean squeezed the living space of other creatures. At first glance, the ocean was full of all kinds of plants.

Primitive algae plants evolved into other plants of various shapes. These plants grew wildly in an environment with sufficient light, air, and water resources, and a towering tree actually grew in the ocean.

Zoey looked closely and realized that it was not a towering tree, but a "monster" composed of various plants intertwined with each other.

In order to compete for sunlight, this behemoth branched out above the sea, shading other plants, and seizing and dominating the sunlight of other plants.

Zoey gradually understood that everything they saw on this journey through the cave passage was actually simulating all the possibilities of species evolution on Earth since its birth.